Americans don’t seem concerned about foreign words entering their language, however. Maybe it’s an extension of our melting-pot theory. As we adopt certain foods into our national cuisine, for example, we adopt the original names along with them. So we call broccoli and zucchini by their Italian names, because that’s where these veggies came from. One note: in Italy, they generally learn British English, not American English. Don’t be surprised if an English-speaking waiter in Rome offers you courgettes instead of zucchini – that’s what the Brits call it. We’ve also happily adopted the words pasta, pizza (from the Italian pizze for pie) and spaghetti (from spaghetto for thin string or twine).
The early Christians scribbled messages and slogans on the walls of the catacombs. This writing came to be known as graffito, or little scratch. We still use the term graffiti for modern-day scratchings on subway cars, buildings, etc.
The tragic death of Princess Diana brought the term paparazzi to headlines all over the world. This word is fairly new. It came from the 1960 Fellini film, La Dolce Vita, and the film’s character photographer-companion of Marcello Mastroianni. The character was based on a real-life street photographer named Tazio Secchiaroli who helped Fellini with his research for the movie. The name Paparazzo (which is reputedly a common surname in Calabria) was borrowed from a vintage travel book titled By the Ionian Sea, which Fellini just happened to be reading at the time.
Some mystery surrounds the English word fiasco. In Italian, it simply means flask – especially the straw-covered kind that chianti manufacturers use. I’m sure I once heard that a shipload of bad chianti poisoned foreign buyers, and so the term came to mean a disaster in English. But when I tried to verify the story for this article, I couldn’t locate it. I did find another explanation, which said that the word came from Venetian glassblowers. If there were any flaws in their hand-crafted products, they then turned them into simple utilitarian flasks (fiasco) rather than works of art.
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